CowboyRobot writes: "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Thursday published details of its new Vetting Commodity IT Software and Firmware (VET) program, which the agency said is designed to find "innovative, large-scale approaches to verifying the security and functionality of commodity IT devices — those commercial information technology devices bought by DOD — to ensure they are free of hidden backdoors and malicious functionality."

The launch of DARPA's new program comes after the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in October 2012 issued a scathing report on Chinese telecommunications companies Huawei and ZTE, saying that they "cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence and thus pose a security threat to the United States and to our systems." The committee "strongly encouraged" businesses in the United States to look elsewhere for their technology."